This invention relates to change management of recipes and other sets of processing information that describe a process flow.
Recipes include a hierarchical description of a process flow. A process flow is a sequence of chemical, physical, or biological activities for the conversion, transport, or storage of material or energy. For example, process flows are used for the production of specialty chemical products, pharmaceutical products, fuels, cosmetics, and foodstuffs. Recipes can also include definitions of resources such as equipment that is deployed to perform the process flow, as well as materials input to perform the process flow and output materials resulting from performance of the process flow.
Recipes often include several different classes of process elements that are arranged in the recipe hierarchy and describe the process flow at various levels of detail. Recipes can also include definitions of resource, input, and output requirements for the process flow.
There are different classes of recipes. General recipes (“GR”) include information related to the process flow independent of specific production resources. General recipes identify raw materials, relative quantities, and required processing, but lack specific information regarding a particular site or the resources available at that site. Site recipes (“SR”) include site-specific information related to the local constraints, such as language and available raw materials at a particular production locale. Master recipes (“MR”) include resource capabilities such as equipment deployable to perform a process flow, and describe activities for a specific production on a specific line. Master recipes can also include information that is specific to a process cell.
One use of recipes and process flows is in the manufacture and the production of products. In this case, a process flow typically represents some manufacturing or production operation. The information included with the process flow in the recipe describes, e.g., the manufacturing or production process, raw materials, and available equipment.